Facilities

CDT Advanced Characterisation of Materials – Facilities

The combined centres of the LCN at UCL and the Materials Department at Imperial College provide a unique suite of cutting-edge materials characterisation tools unrivalled in the UK. These facilities are available to CDT students and their industrial sponsors, along with the expertise of the academic and technical staff who manage them. Each institution has a world leading technical focus in specific research areas which are shared across the CDT programme. For example the Imperial College Centre for Electron Microscopy has three scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) and three transmission electron microscopes (TEMs), the latest being the state-of-the-art monochromated FEI TITAN 80/300, and Zeiss Auriga Dual Beam FIBSEM. The department also has an extensive range of surface analysis techniques, including Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS), Low Energy Ion Scattering (LEIS) and X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS). Similarly the LCN at UCL has a several laboratories containing low temperature scanning tunnelling microscopes (STM) and one entire floor of the building is a dedicated cleanroom, housing an electron beam lithography (EBL) system amongst many other techniques.

Being a part of the CDT all of the students will have access to a dedicated suite of instruments, funded by EPSRC, to support our aim of providing state-of-the-art training in complementary characterisation techniques. We have recently installed a JEOL 6010LA SEM, Panalytical Epsilon 3 XRF and Malvern Zetasizer at Imperial and Micro-Raman Spectroscopy (MRS) and XPS at UCL, the later with being specified to meet the need of training students.

In addition, both institutions also provide extensive computational support for theoretical modelling research. The above-mentioned examples are but a few of our extensive range of characterisation techniques. Further details of the facilities available can be found in the following links